Israeli-Czech Team Uses Yeast Cells to Evolve Omicron-Like Coronavirus Receptor-Binding Variants in Lab

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Charles University in Prague recreated the evolutionary path from the original Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 to Omicron-like variants inside a test tube within a few months. The study, published June 13, 2026, in Nature Communications under the title “Stringent selection drives convergence toward omicron-like SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding motifs,” used genetically engineered baker’s yeast cells to expose millions of viral variants to human receptors and retained those that bound successfully.

Aviv Shoshany from Prof.

Gideon Schreiber’s team at Weizmann led the experiment under strong selection pressure. Ruojin Tian, Dr. Miguel Padilla-Blanco, and Dr. Martin Mokrejš from Dr. Jirí Zahradník’s group at Charles University simulated weak selection pressure.

Under strong selection pressure, a variant remarkably similar to Omicron and its sub-variants emerged early and rapidly took over the population, regardless of whether the experiment began with the original Wuhan strain, Alpha, Beta, or Omicron. Gideon Schreiber said.

The researchers replicated the gene encoding the coronavirus binding site using a deliberately error-prone mechanism to simulate mutations. They repeated cycles of mutation and selection to reconstruct the virus-human interaction over the course of a pandemic.

In August 2021, Schreiber and colleagues published an in vitro evolution experiment that identified a pair of mutations improving binding to human respiratory tract receptors.

Approximately three months later, the Omicron variant was first identified in South Africa and contained the same pair of mutations. “We found that if you begin with Omicron, even if it’s weak, it’s stable and remains there,” Prof.